


new constellations

by sapphicbecca



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Cuddling, M/M, Pondering The Meaning Of Life and So On, Stargazing, and then post-164, basically they spend a night stargazing at the safehouse, canon-typical humanity is important and our experiences matter!!, plus! some fun greek myths, post-159 pre-160, then during the apocalypse they reflect on it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:41:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24306106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphicbecca/pseuds/sapphicbecca
Summary: Later, Martin would miss the stars. He would look back on that night, and would remember how strongly his poet’s mind thought that, while they were gazing up, that the starry night sky was looking back down on them, as well. But it was nothing, he would know,nothingcompared to how hungrily the sky stared at them now.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 20
Kudos: 70





	new constellations

**Author's Note:**

> first: thank you to hannah [@celestielles](https://celestielles.tumblr.com) on tumblr for reading this over for me and making sure it was coherent!! 
> 
> second: this fic is primarily inspired by martin's 'i think our experience of the universe has value' quote and by that one time in s1 when jon mentioned having at least a decent knowledge of greek mythology. also by the one astronomy class i took last summer

_like constellations imploding in the night_

_everything is turning, everything is turning_

_and the shapes that you drew may change beneath a different light_

_and everything you thought you knew will fall apart, but you'll be all right_

  
  


Martin’s never really had the chance to see the stars before. 

That isn’t to say that he hasn’t wanted to, of course, because he’s a poet, so he’s always wanted to go properly stargazing. It’s just that there _aren’t_ any stars out in London, not really. It’s too crowded and overlit for any to show up in that dull grey sky. Even when Martin went out walking in the dead of night, if he looked up he would only see that washed-out and empty canvas, containing a sliver of the moon hanging lonely in the sky.

Scotland isn’t like that. 

When Martin looks up at the sky here, he can _see,_ and something tight constricts in his chest as he gazes up at the hundreds or thousands or millions of stars splayed out in the dark sky above him. He’d missed it their first night here - they’d arrived at the safehouse together quite late the night before, and hadn’t done much but collapse into bed together and fall asleep. Now though, after a day full of cleaning and unpacking and talking, the sun set swiftly once more, bringing about the deep blue of the night sky, and Martin finally has the time to stop and see it. 

Without the choke of light pollution out on these empty rolling fields, the heavens are on full display and it’s not just the distant pinpricks of constellations, it’s the sweeping clouds of faraway galaxies, the spilled out mess of the cosmos just sitting over him. Blues and purples weave their way through the sky, running rampant and intertwining around each other in thick coils of interstellar dust. There is absolutely nothing for Martin to do but stare. 

He knows when most people gaze off into the otherworldly and distant sights of the universe, they come back to themselves with that ant-like feeling of insignificance, of finding so little meaning in themselves up against the never-ending vastness of that deep unknowable vacuum. He supposes that makes sense, because from a logical and scientific perspective, when compared to the entire universe, he is less than a speck of dust, a tiny blip in the history of the universe. 

Martin knows he should feel small when he looks up into space, but he doesn’t. Instead, he feels bigger than he ever has before, so much more whole and filled out, like some lost little part of him finally fell into place. A soft _oh_ and a let-out breath of relief, a realization that the thing you didn’t even know was missing has, at long last, found its way home. 

There’s something grounding, he thinks, in looking up at the sky, in remembering that every other human who walked the earth looked up at that same sky at some point, in knowing some of them even gazed up long enough to find stories hidden in the spaces between those little dots of light. Humans can still barely reach the stars, but they’ve left their mark nonetheless. 

The stars blink above him, and Martin can feel the weight of their returned gaze, and he welcomes it. Then there’s a gentle hand on Martin’s elbow, and he turns, and there’s Jon, sidled up quietly beside him. 

“Hi,” Martin says. 

“Hi,” Jon says, and, “what are you doing out here?” 

“Oh, I was just-” Martin waves a vague hand upward towards the stars, not sure how to describe everything he’d been thinking. “I was just taking in the sights, I guess.” 

At his words, Jon tilts his head as well, and Martin can see as the stars fall into the reflections in his eyes, and as a small smile slowly opens up his face. “Hold on,” Jon says, and darts back inside. Martin stands at the gate, nonplussed.

“What was that?” he asks a moment later, when Jon re-emerges clutching an oversized bundle in his thin arms. 

“Here you go,” Jon says as an answer, handing Martin a corner of a rather ratty blanket. It’s wearing thin in a few spots, sporting a few odd stains as well as some narrow and stretched-out holes. It’s nowhere near as nice as the thick quilt they found draped over the mattress in the main bedroom, so Martin doesn’t feel nearly as bad as perhaps he should as he helps Jon lay it out on the dewy grass. Jon smoothes out a corner, and then they both lay down atop it, shoulder to shoulder, looking up. The stars look eagerly back down.

“It’s really something, isn’t it?” Martin murmurs. 

Jon hums in agreement. “You would never see it in London, that’s for sure.” 

Martin nods, then remembers that they’re out here in the dark. “Yeah,” he says, quickly rectifying his mistake. He searches the full sky, though he is not sure for what. There is no moon tonight, so the stars have full reign of the ink-black sky, and they’ve taken advantage of that lack of moonlight, glittering and twinkling in whorls and clouds above them.

As Martin slowly drinks it all in, he remembers from some near-forgotten grade-school lesson that some of these stars are already long gone. The light from stars takes light-years and light-years to travel to Earth, so in that time some of them have reached the end of their extensive lifespan. Martin wonders which have dimmed and faded out quietly, and which ended with a bang, succumbing instead to a supernova. He wonders which stars caved in on themselves, eating up all of who they used to be, and turning from something that provided life and light and warmth, to something that is only dark and hungry, stealing all the things they used to give freely. It’s odd, he thinks, with a pang of mixed melancholy, nostalgia and some other feeling he can’t quite place, to think that he could be staring up at some cosmic graveyard without realizing, without knowing which stars still blazed furiously and which had burnt out and stopped sending light a long time ago.

(Martin finds, as he thinks on it some more, that he can’t actually quite wrap his mind around that - an existence where living is parallel to burning. Usually, he’d look for poetry in such revelations or metaphors, try to find some way to spin his thoughts into words and pen marks on a page, but not here. There’s something too harsh and unforgiving about that kind of life, so he does his best to put that thought from his mind.)

Martin then realizes Jon would probably Know which stars were alive and still burning, a million miles away. He doesn’t ask. 

Martin moves away from his thoughts on the smoldering life of stars and finds himself wishing, vaguely, that he knew more about constellations. He wishes he could point them out to Jon, to have them both watch as his raised hand connected the dots and drew the story of ancient heroes out in front of them. Next to him, Jon shifts slightly. 

“If you look up there,” Jon says softly, speaking with that new gentle version of his voice that Martin is still trying to get used to, that voice that sounds like he’s holding Martin close and tight, while lifting his scarred hand up, “underneath that bright star, uh - Vega, I think? That’s Hercules. That yellow-ish star is his waist, and the ones near it make up his arms and legs.” 

“Oh,” Martin says, because he has nothing else to say, because he watches as Jon’s hand traces the lines between the stars.

“He’s, ah - he’s standing on the head of the Draco constellation, as well. That’s the serpent he defeated in the myths. There, that brighter yellow star is its head, and then it coils down and around _Ursa Minor_ \- the Little Dipper.” Jon’s hand follows his words.

“What other constellations do you see?” Martin asks quickly. With a sudden thrill, he knows now that he loves this, this thing that they are doing together. He loves hearing Jon talk about the things he knows - or perhaps the things he Knows - but Martin doesn’t really care as much as he probably should, because he loves listening to what Jon has to say. 

“Oh!” Jon says brightly. “Well, there’s - there’s Pegasus, of course, the winged horse. He’s right above us - that bright star there, and then follow it down the hooves - yeah. And then right next to him is the princess, Andromeda, from that white star, down to that yellow one, there.” Jon lets out a slow breath. “I forgot how many constellations I’d memorized when I was a kid. There was…there was a book, from the library, and I must have checked it out over and over until I could pick out all the shapes that showed up in the night sky back in Bournemouth.” 

Martin smiles at that, and a sweet gentle feeling fills him up at the thought of this so-much-younger Jon with his library book and the night sky. Martin sees this piece of him, this scrap of a kid memorizing constellations for no reason other than wanting to, and he decides to hold on, to remember it.

“Any others out there?” he asks quietly. 

“Plenty,” Jon assures him, and then they begin to spill out of him. The beautiful queen Cassiopeia, condemned to circle the sky upside down as punishment for her vanity, the courageous swan Cygnus, who died to save his best friend and was thereafter honored by the gods, the brave warrior Perseus, who stands out among the pantheon of Greek heroes as one whose story didn’t end in tragedy. Jon spins out the stories they can see above them, and others too that he remembers, and Martin listens as the night grows deeper and later. Jon points out some planets as well, helping Martin spot Jupiter and Saturn hovering bright just above the horizon.

Eventually, Jon seems to run out of constellations and stories and celestial beings, or maybe his hand is just tired, because it drops back to his side and then immediately finds Martin’s hand, open and waiting, their fingers quickly intertwining. They stay quiet as they hold onto each other and watch the sky drifting in its infinitesimally slow rotation above them. There’s no rush for them, either, no need to go anywhere or do anything. They’ve already done their chores for the day: they washed the dishes, made the bed, unpacked what luggage they could. All that’s left on the to-do list now is staying together, spending this brief respite with each other for as long as they can. The stars keep blinking.

After maybe a half-hour of quiet stargazing, Martin decides to tear his eyes away from the sky, hoping to steal a glimpse of Jon in the dark. When he finally turns his head and glances over, however, Jon is staring straight at him. Martin’s breath catches and he wonders, startled and half-giddy, if Jon had even bothered to look up again after his storytelling faded out. Jon blinks and flushes, caught red-handed in the simple act of looking. 

“Hi,” Martin says, again. 

“Hi,” Jon says, again. 

Martin notes, with a sudden twisting in his stomach, that they’re only inches apart here in the dark, already pressed up against each other, shoulder to shoulder, hands intertwined. And the thing is, his nerves shouldn’t be making his insides tumble the way they are, because they _have_ already kissed. They had the whole day to themselves and to each other, so of course they talked and they kissed. 

There’s just - something different, though, Martin thinks, about a kiss stolen in the utter and complete dark of night, underneath the keen eye of all the nebulae drifting by. 

Jon gently runs a thumb along the curve of Martin’s hand, and Martin says nothing, just nudging a shoulder and holding Jon’s gaze. Jon’s eyes are dark, almost reflective, and something in the way they look at him swallows Martin whole. 

(Martin wonders how his own eyes must look in this darkness; how much of him they rip open and reveal to Jon, and how much they allow him to keep tucked inside.)

Jon reaches out with his other hand, the one scarred only by worms and not by burning heat, and tucks a stray curl of Martin’s hair back behind his ear. Martin leans happily into the gentle touch as it dances along his jawline, and he smiles. 

Then Jon whispers “Can I kiss you?” and Martin’s heart jumps into his throat even though he knew this was coming, even though he’d been waiting for it, eagerly and patiently. He blinks heavily, stars and galaxies quite forgotten at this point, and brings himself ever so slightly closer, his hand moving over to cup the back of Jon’s head, fingers combing through messy hair to find a place to rest. Jon scoots forward just the tiniest bit to close the distance between them, and then Martin can feel him smiling into the kiss that lands rather crookedly on the edge of Martin’s mouth, and Martin smiles too. After a second Jon pulls back with a small laugh to try again, and this time his aim proves much better, and Martin sighs contentedly against the side of Jon’s mouth as they slot into place against each other. 

The late September air comes with a biting chill that only grows sharper as the night dips lower, but Martin finds he doesn’t mind at the moment, because Jon is warm enough. They’re all tangled up in each other now, and he’s not quite sure how they got this way, but as the night wore on, they became quite a mess of arms and legs out on their thin blanket, staring up together into the stars. 

That’s alright, though, Martin thinks, even if Jon’s head is resting right on his left arm, and he can feel all the fingers in his hand go tingly with pins and needles as they slowly fall asleep. He likes the feeling of not knowing where he ends and where Jon begins. 

(Martin is reminded, with a pleasant warmth spreading through him at the thought, of one of the myths Jon mentioned, of four-armed and four-legged people who were forced to split up and subsequently spent their whole lives searching for the person they used to be a part of. Entangled with Jon like this, Martin feels like that eight-limbed, double-hearted being.) 

They’ve gone back to quietly watching the stars. Martin knows, though it goes far too slowly to really see, that the stars are moving ever so slightly through the sky above him, as the Earth slowly turns on its axis. Jon had mentioned that as the hours passed by, other constellations would slowly come into view, like the hunter Orion. Jon said it was one of the most recognizable constellations by the three stars that made up his belt, but also that it wouldn’t be really visible until three in the morning. 

Martin is more than happy to stay out here for an eternity and more with Jon, but he’s also quite sure he’ll have completely passed out by three. Last he checked, it was barely half-past nine. He shifts his gaze back to Jon, thinking about asking if he’d like to perhaps turn in for now with a cup of tea, or maybe to just go straight to bed. As Martin opens his mouth to ask, however, he realizes Jon won’t be able to answer. His head is still resting on Martin’s half-numb arm, but his breathing is even and slow, and his eyes are closed. Martin hastily goes still, that sudden stillness that only ever comes when you realize someone has fallen asleep on top of you. 

“…Jon?” he tries, voice hesitant and soft, but Jon doesn’t stir. Martin thinks he really would let him stay there forever, but he also honestly can not feel his fingers anymore, and the night is growing colder around them with every minute that passes, with Martin growing quite tired, as well. He also thinks it probably wouldn’t be the smartest idea for both of them to fall asleep in the open backyard in the middle of the freezing night. 

Martin takes his free hand and runs it gently along Jon’s shoulder, giving him a little nudge. Jon mutters something indistinct under his breath and stretches again, still fast asleep. Martin is sure he’s never seen Jon sleep this peacefully and soundly before, absolutely dead to the world as he is in Martin’s arms. 

Martin tries not to be too pleased about that. 

“Jon,” he tries again. “Jon. Jon - hey. Hi. Can you hear me?” He accompanies every other word with more gentle nudges until Jon finally cracks his eyes open, managing to send Martin a look that is both overwhelmingly grumpy and fond. 

“Hi,” he yawns. 

“Morning,” Martin says lightly. Jon looks up at the night sky still turning above them and snickers softly, twisting over on his side to wrap himself somehow closer around Martin. His head lands on Martin’s shoulder and Martin hurriedly flexes the fingers on his left arm, trying to regain a sense of feeling in them. 

“How long was I asleep?” Jon asks. 

“Not long,” Martin says. “I was actually about to ask if you wanted to head inside when I noticed, though.” 

Jon hums and looks up at Martin. “It is getting a bit chilly, I suppose.” 

“How does some tea sound?” Martin asks. 

“Tea sounds wonderful.” Jon smiles sleepily, and so Martin slowly stands, brushes himself off, then offers Jon his hand. Jon takes it and lifts himself up, and he doesn’t let go, even as he struggles to pick up the blanket one-handed before Martin leans down to help him. They walk back across the small yard, head back into the warmth of the safehouse. When they reach the door, Martin looks up behind his shoulder and catches one more glimpse of the constellations rolled out over the night sky. He sees them, those ancient stories carved permanently into the stars, and he thinks about that, before turning in and heading back inside with Jon. 

* * *

(Later, Martin would miss the stars. He would look back on that night, and would remember how strongly his poet’s mind thought that, while they were gazing up, that the starry night sky was looking back down on them, as well. But it was nothing, he would know, _nothing_ compared to how hungrily the sky stared at them now.) 

* * *

“Oh, I - I actually think I have another question,” Martin says. They’ve been traveling the wasteland of their ruined world for some indeterminable amount of time now, and currently the ground is dusty and hard beneath Martin’s worn sneakers. The Corrupted village that they’d recently passed through is no longer in sight, and there are no other towns or landmarks visible on the horizon. Everything is instead hazy and tinged an awful shade of red, making it near impossible to see very far into the distance, anyway. 

“Oh?” Jon says. He’s a couple of steps ahead of Martin, but pauses so they’re once more walking side by side. 

“The, um-” Martin looks up at the sky. The sky looks down at Martin. “The stars. Are they still…are they still _out_ there? Somewhere?” 

Jon stops mid-stride and Martin stops too, suddenly worrying that he asked something he shouldn’t have. He reaches over to grab Jon’s hand, while the dull thrum of static builds up in his ears. 

“I - oh.” Jon frowns. “It’s, ah, I don’t think it can-?” He stops, his face drawn out in some painful-looking expression of deep concentration. 

“What?” Martin asks.

“It’s, um - right. Okay, so it’s like the back of your skull,” Jon says confidently, as if that makes any goddamn sense at all. Martin stares at him. 

“Sorry?” 

“The Eye can see the whole world,” Jon starts slowly, gesturing with his hands to emphasize whatever point he’s about to make. “So if it’s looking _down_ on Earth, on us, then it’s not looking up - or out, or wherever.”

“Okay,” Martin says, still very much not understanding what the back of his skull has to do with the continued existence of stars.

Jon lets out an exasperated huff. “It’s like, the same way your eyes don’t roll backwards and let you see your own eye sockets in your head. The Eye is very much focused on us and Earth, which means all I can See is-”

“Is just us and Earth, got it,” Martin says, a bit shortly. He hesitates. “So, no stars?”

Jon looks up at him, and his mournful gaze falls heavy onto Martin’s shoulders. “I don’t know, Martin. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Martin says automatically, and shoves his free hand into his jacket pocket, looking down at the ground. Jon falls quiet next to him and they continue walking, still holding onto each other as they traipse through the devastated world around them. Martin doesn’t let go, not knowing when they’ll next encounter some fresh slew of horrors, not wanting to get separated. This is not somewhere he’d want to get lost - it’s barely _anywhere_ at all. 

They stop to breathe after some long period of quiet walking, though Martin doesn’t know if it was twenty minutes or three hours or a whole day. Time is so hard to hold onto now. They don’t really need to stop, of course, but they do it anyway, because sometimes this world is easier to deal with when they pretend they need the moment of rest. 

Martin is kneeling and rifling through his bag, looking for - for something, he doesn’t know what, maybe just for something to do - when Jon sidles up quietly behind him and cautiously places a hand on Martin’s shoulder. 

“Hi,” he says. His voice is barely above a whisper, but Martin can still hear him clearly over the wailing, groaning sobs of the world breaking down around them. 

“Hi,” Martin says.

“It’d be a bit hard,” says Jon, clearly jumping into his latest thought without any preamble, while sounding rather pensive and sitting down carefully in the dirt next to Martin, “but if you traced out the veins of the eye, you could probably find some new type of constellations.” 

Martin has to bite down on an unexpected laugh. “The new post-apocalyptic stargazing,” he says, a lighthearted tone weaving its way into his voice, “staring up at the bloody veins crisscrossing the giant eye that sits above us all and is always watching!”

“Exactly!” Jon says brightly, and points up vaguely to the right. “Like, that one looks like…a bolt of lightning?”

“No, no, you’re wrong there,” Martin says, suddenly mockingly serious, “I think it looks _much_ more like a fork in a long and winding river.”

“Ah, of course,” Jon says, adopting the same falsely professional tone, “that’s definitely it.” He smiles at Martin, who smiles back easily, before turning his gaze up towards the ever-watching sky. 

“Thanks,” Martin says quietly, after a short moment passes. He looks over to see Jon’s smile slipping and wavering. “What?”

“I - nothing,” Jon says, a little too quickly, shaking his head. 

Martin gives him a hard look. “What?” he says again. 

“It’s just - you shouldn’t be thanking me for anything,” Jon mutters, listlessly wringing his hands in his lap. “It’s my fault that it’s like this in-”

“Jon, stop,” Martin says firmly. He takes a slow breath in. “Just…thank you.” 

Jon pauses, then nods, saying nothing, just folding himself up against Martin, tucking his head atop Martin’s shoulder. They let the uncountable minutes pass them by, watching as the shimmer on the horizon glows with that rust-red haze, their backs to that ever-watching tower that’s almost too far away to really see. 

Martin does not think about the man watching them from that tower, nor does he think about the eye that stares at them always, no matter where they hide. Instead, he thinks about the stars. 

It stings inside him to think about everything that’s been lost. With the world utterly razed and rewritten, so much history of humanity has been simply erased, and not just the physical monuments, the old ruins and ancient artifacts. Statues can get taken down, castles will crumble, but the stories and tales that humanity loves to spin over fires, as bedtime rituals, in front of large crowds, the stories that have outlasted empires were supposed to last as long as there were people who keep telling them, who keep them sharp and real and present. But how can you tell a tale of the stars without any of the distant lights to point to? 

Martin looks up at where the stars used to be. Even if they were still there, displaying their old fables, who is there to tell them? With everyone suffering in different pockets of pure terror scattered across the world, their fear either drawn out indefinitely or else finally allowed to collapse into the restful arms of the End, there is no one able to take the time to recall an old myth. 

Martin can hardly bear to dwell on how much else of humanity is disappearing around them. He thinks of languages he heard of with only one fluent speaker left, of all the stories that have been passed down for thousands of years by word of mouth, and of the millions of intricate family histories and silly little tales of great-great-great-grandparents - all gone, now, with no one to hold them up, to remember them. 

Martin closes his eyes and leans against Jon. He wishes he could remember them all for everyone else. He wishes he could keep the spark that’s driven humanity for millennia alight for just as long as it takes to get everything right again. 

Eventually Jon shifts against Martin. “Are you ready to keep going?” he asks, his voice back to that new low and gentle way he’s sounded since they left the cabin, the way that feels as though he’s holding Martin ever so gingerly and at arms’ length for fear of gripping too tight and shattering him. 

“Maybe not yet,” Martin replies. He’s still thinking about all the stories untold and lost. He’s thinking about who could still remember them. “Actually - do you think you could tell me one of those stories?”

Jon cranes his head to look up at him. “What stories?” 

“The ones about the constellations,” Martin says, “and how they got put up in the sky. The ones you told me…before.”

“Oh,” Jon says, “of - of course. Which one?”

“Don’t care. You pick,” Martin says. “Whichever’s your favorite.” 

“Right,” Jon says, and pauses before continuing, taking a moment to think. “Uh, Cygnus the swan, I suppose. Do you remember that one?”

“A bit,” Martin answers, “but tell it again anyway.” 

“Okay, well, there are a few different versions of how that particular swan got into the sky,” Jon starts. “One myth describes the endeavor of Zeus, king of the gods, as he transformed into a swan to seduce a queen of Sparta, which-”

“Gross,” Martin cuts in. 

“Gross,” Jon agrees. “Another story says Orpheus was transformed into a swan after grieving his wife, Eurydice, and eventually dying, and was placed up into the sky next to his old favorite instrument, the lyre. But I think my favorite version is the one that follows Phaethon, and his-” Jon clears his throat- _“close friend,_ Cygnus.” 

Martin snorts. 

“Anyway,” Jon continues, his voice light and his words seeming to come out easier than they have in a long while, “Phaethon was the son of the sun god, so one day he was allowed to take his father’s sun chariot out for a ride, despite lacking the skills and strength needed to control it.” 

Martin can feel himself beginning to relax. The cadence of Jon’s voice is steady and grounding, and the story spills out of him like he’s told it a million times. Martin closes his eyes, lets the tension leak out of his shoulders for the first time in a long while. He trusts the comfort, just for a moment. 

“-so as he’s wrecking and burning the countryside, Zeus takes notices, and hurls down one of his lightning bolts to knock Phaethon out of the chariot.” Jon pauses to take a breath. “Even though he’s half-god, he’s still half-human, so the strike kills him, and his body falls to Earth and lands in a river. His friend - his _lover,_ Cygnus, sees it happen, and is so stricken with grief that he begs the gods to turn him into a swan, so that he can rescue Phaethon’s body from the river, if only to be given a proper burial.” 

“Why a swan?” Martin interrupts. “It’s not exactly the first animal I’d think of to go diving in a river - especially to retrieve an entire body.” 

“It is just a story,” Jon says with a shrug. “Maybe it just seemed more poetic to the ancient Greeks. But according to the story, he also takes on the limited lifespan of a swan, and doesn’t last long after he finishes pulling Phaethon from the river. The gods see and admire his devotion, however, so after he dies, they award him by lifting up that image of the swan and creating it in the stars.” Jon finishes his story with a little flourish of his hands up toward the sky, and then scoots closer to lean into Martin. 

Martin looks down at him. “Why’s that your favorite?” he asks, a little incredulous. 

(Martin doesn’t voice the question that actually sits in the back of his skull, the one that bothers him in a way he doesn’t quite want to put a finger on - he doesn’t ask who Jon sees himself as in this ancient and tragic myth. Does Jon think he is the swan, ready to sacrifice himself to save his love one last time, or does he think he is the son of the sun god, riding towards his inevitable doom, scorching the Earth in a fiery chariot he’d long since lost control of?

Martin doesn’t ask, because he really doesn’t want to know.) 

“I don’t know,” Jon says after hesitating briefly. “Just a compelling narrative, I suppose, and one that’s usually left out or told differently in other versions of the myth. I guess I like the stories told less often.” 

Martin hums softly at that answer, and tucks a gentle arm around Jon, slotting him into place by Martin’s side, and he thinks. 

He thinks about the people who came before him, who put stories up in the night sky, in the most permanent place they could find. He thinks about how, millennia ago, they took what they were given and what they saw every night, and how they shaped the vast expanse of stars like wet clay between their fingers, molding it into stories that boasted the best and the worst of what humanity had to offer. Martin thinks about how many billions of people must have gazed up at the constellations over the thousands of years and felt somewhat comforted by the reminder of all the humans that came before them. He thinks about a time when he was still able to see constellations, and just how many years he wasted not doing that.

Martin does not think about the eye in the sky, bulging and greedy and surrounded by swathes of thick reddish clouds. He tries not to think about the moon or the sun. He does not know if either transformed into the eye, or if the eye just appeared and blocked everything else out. He does not want to know.

He thinks instead about Jon, stuck in a fiery careening chariot, killing the earth no matter how he tries to save it, or plunging deep into cold waters to save the one he loves, his own body transformed into a timed countdown to his own death. Martin thinks about himself, watching Jon plummet from that burning chariot, or watching from the bottom of a river as Jon sacrifices himself to bring him to shore. He does not know which is worse, and he does know yet which one is happening. 

He hopes neither. But he knows better. 

“Ready to keep going?” Jon asks. Martin nods wordlessly, and Jon stands, offering Martin his hand. Martin glances up once more at the sky that used to be a tapestry to humanity, to stories, and takes Jon’s hand, and stands. He adjusts his backpack and then they begin walking, the gaze of the red sky following their footsteps, as they grow, ever closer, to their goal.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> hi & thank you for reading!! 
> 
> title ~~stolen~~ borrowed from new constellations by ryn weaver  
> intro lyrics from constellations by the oh hellos! 
> 
> fun fact: with regards to the first half, those are the actual constellations you would see if you went stargazing on a clear night in scotland during autumn!  
> also: i know that there are different versions to how phaethon's story ends, i just liked this version best for the story 
> 
> also! if you're interested in more safehouse stargazing fics, please check out [the stars are out (but he’s burning brighter)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27092803) by [jewishfitz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jewishfitz/pseuds/jewishfitz)
> 
> you can also find me on:  
> my [tumblr](https://thirteenthdyke.tumblr.com) where i'm actively losing it over s5


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